Accepted author’s version NEOCON GREECE: V. D. HANSON’S WAR ON HISTORY Francisco Javier González García* Pedro López Barja de Quiroga** University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)*** ABSTRACT: Given the fact that Victor Davis Hanson has a habit of making his views on almost everything public, it is not difficult to fit them into a neoconservative ideology. His remarks about ex-President Bush, the Iraq war or the threat of Mexican immigration to the identity of the United States leave no margin for doubt on this point. What we want to do in this article is to show how this ideology lays the foundations upon which he builds his proposals on the character of ancient Greek society, and especially on hoplite combat. Given these theoretical premises, it is easy to understand that the result is a complete distortion of the history of Greece, a distortion Hanson wants to expand to the entire history of the Western civilization****. 1. Neoconservatism Neoconservatism is an ill-defined political ideology which has deeply influenced the Republican Party and therefore has also left an impact on U.S. policy during the last decades of the Twentieth century. The origins of neoconservatism may be found in the City College of New York during the thirties, among a tiny group of students who were both Jews and Troskists: Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell or Nathan Glazer. They read Partisan Review and cultivated a very strong opposition to Stalinism and the USSR. In New York College, Kristol attended the lessons of Leo Strauss, a powerful Jewish intellectual who emigrated from Germany in 1932 with the unexpected help of Carl Schmitt1. After a short stay in Paris and Cambridge, he moved to the U.S. in 1937. He taught in New York, at the New School for Social Research from 1938 to 1949 and then at the University of Chicago uninterruptedly until his retirement in 1968. As Professor of Political Science, he made his students understand that they ‘had been looking at the history of Western political thought through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of our looking down at them * Profesor Titular. E-mail: [email protected] ** Profesor Titular. E-mail: [email protected] *** Adress: Departamento de Historia I. Facultad de Geografía e Historia. Plaza de la Universidad 1. E-15782. Santiago de Compostela. Spain. **** We want to give thanks to Salvador Mas (UNED), Julián Gallego (UBA) and Phiroze Vasunia (Reading) for their comments on this article, which obviously enough, does not mean that they share in all the views here exposed. 1 The connection between Schmitt and Strauss is a thorny issue. Even if they had no contact whatsoever from the moment the latter left Germany, it is clear that the ‘Crown-Jurist’ of Nazi Germany had an impact on the young Strauss: both were critics with the modern liberal state. See Meier 1988 and Vergniolle de Chantal 2005. International Journal of the Classical Tradition (January 2013) 1 DOI 10.1007/s12138-012-0313-4 Accepted author’s version from the high vantage point of our more “advanced” era, he trained his students to look at modernity through the eyes of the “ancients” and the premoderns, accepting the premise that they were wiser and more insightful than we are’2. Strauss was a committed critic of Modernity and the Enlightenment: he wanted to recover a truth, a sense of the rational which was peculiar to the Ancients and had been obliterated by the Moderns, by Hobbes in particular (a point in which he was in full agreement with Carl Schmitt). He defended Natural Law and criticized bitterly cultural relativism. In his own words: ‘If principles are sufficiently justified by the fact that they are accepted by a society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible or sound as those of a civilized life’3. For him, the modern rejection of natural law is identical to ‘nihilism’, that is, the idea that all criteria of justice or morality are historically relative4. Yet this truth should not be revealed to everyone. As one of his students (Allan Bloom, to whom we will return later) put it in a kind of Strauss’ obituary: ‘Philosophy is dangerous for it must always call everything into question while in politics not everything can be called into question. The peculiar horror of modern tyranny has been its alliance with perverted philosophy’5. This ‘esoteric’ concealing of the truth was also practiced –Strauss contended- by ancient authors, Thucydides included. Strauss aimed at rescuing the Greek historian from those of his interpreters who could only see the surface and catalogue him as a ‘realist’, interested only in power and domination. This was, and still is, the main conclusion reached by Classical and International relation scholars alike, such as H. Morgentau and W. Jaeger. But this was not Strauss’s opinion. In his view Thucydides ‘may be making a silent teaching about natural or divine law. That the plague follows Pericles’ speech, which mentions nothing about the gods, and that the Sicilian disaster follows the Melian dialogue, to Strauss showed that there are heavy costs in violating divine law’6 . The influence of Leo Strauss’s ideas in contemporary U.S. politics has been much bigger than what could be expected of a university professor who wrote difficult books on topics such as Plato or Machiavelli. His many students were the vehicle through which he achieved this, the so- called ‘straussians’, who have attained high positions in the administration or the universities. Although there is some overlapping, they should not be directly identified with neocons. 2 Kristol 1995, 8. 3 Strauss 1965, 3. 4 Nash 1998, 45. On Hobbes as (for Strauss) ‘the crucial break between the Ancients and the Moderns’ see Smith 2009, 24. 5 Bloom 1974, 388. 6 Gustafson 2000, 192. International Journal of the Classical Tradition (January 2013) 2 DOI 10.1007/s12138-012-0313-4 Accepted author’s version Paraphrasing a well-known saying of Irving Kristol, one could almost define neoconservatives as ‘straussians mugged by reality’. Reality came when Reagan was first sworn into office and put into practice the ‘supply side’ doctrine in the economy. Meanwhile in foreign policy he adopted a very aggressive attitude against the USSR which fulfilled neocon ambitions, an ‘unholy alliance’ between neocons and neoliberals from which ‘a fiercely anti-democratic political culture results’7. The main impulse in this aggressive foreign policy was provided by the Project for a New American Century, the neocon think-tank founded in 1997 (it closed in 2006) under the general idea that ‘American leadership is good for America and good for the world’. In his Statement of Principles we find the following: ‘we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles’. Among the signatories, there were names such as Richard B. Cheney, William J. Bennet, Francis Fukuyama, Donald Kagan (an important name for us, for he is a classicist with close ties to Hanson; we will return to him later), Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz (who studied with Bloom at Cornell and with Strauss at Chicago). The leading position of neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their key role in the war on Iraq is a well-known story. An American journalist even coined the word ‘Leo-Cons’ to summarize the deep impact of ‘straussians’ on neocon politicians. A full book was published in 1997 (that is three years before G.W. Bush won the elections) in order to prove ‘that American neoconservatism, the ideology that dominates the Republican Party, echoes the themes of Strauss’s political thought’8. Still the picture is not so crystal-clear. Strauss’s abhorrence of modern liberalism does not fit in well with neoliberal doctrines in the economy which neocons, as we have already seen, enthusiastically endorsed when Reagan came into power. Hanson himself does not see a clear influence of Strauss on the foreign policy of the Bush administration (which he held to be dominated by followers of a realist approach in International Relations) while other analysts think that the leading officials of Bush’s foreign policy were just liberals (‘Wilsonians’) in disguise9. As we shall see, Hanson’s ideas are neoconservative much more than straussian, but there are some very telling echoes of Strauss’s writings in his work. Some people may think of Neoconservatism as a thing of the past –its obituary at least has already been written- but that would be a mistake10. 17 out of 24 “special advisers” on foreign policy selected by Mitt Romney worked as senior officials in the Bush administration; four of them 7 Brown 2006. Cf. Xenos 2007, 243. 8 Atlas 2003; Drury 4. 9 See Hanson 2009. On liberals in disguise, see West 2004. 10 Bradley Thompson and Brook 2010. International Journal of the Classical Tradition (January 2013) 3 DOI 10.1007/s12138-012-0313-4 Accepted author’s version signed the letter of the Project for the New American Century calling to remove Sadam Hussein from power11. Obama’s victory has blocked this move, but no one can predict for how long. Meanwhile neoconservative’s influence has not stopped growing, with the use of blogs, Youtube or whatever media suit their needs. Among this noisy chorus, V.D. Hanson has been and still is very generous in his public appearances or speeches. As he is a reputed professor, there is the risk that his distorted version of Ancient Greece may be taken by laymen as the canonical or the one “agreed upon” by experts.